This
is a paper
summing up a lot about the theory of determinism and its consequences
-- for a lecture to medical students and others at
University College London. The other lecturer on the same evening was
the distinguished neuroscientist Professor Patrick Haggard.

Determinism

Are there many determinists? It
would be reassuring for the likes of me to think that there are an awful lot of
empiricists, and so that there must be a good many determinists. But you will
not be slow to ask, rightly, what I mean in speaking of empiricists. Empiricism
can hardly be adequate if it is the practice of limiting oneself to
propositions that are directly confirmed by sense experience -- limiting
oneself to perceptual consciousness. More has to get into inquiry and
judgement. Few of us are attracted to the German and other tradition of
philosophical Rationalism as opposed to English and other Empiricism. But most
of us must be attracted to the idea that the hope of truth must lie in both
experience and what you can call the three imperatives of the ordinary logic of
intelligence -- clarity, usually by analysis, and consistency and validity, and
completeness (cf. Van Fraassen, 1980).

Empiricism can indeed reasonably be
taken as experience and ordinary logic. In another description, it is what
includes a marriage or kind of cohabitation or visits back and forth of science
and philosophy, the latter in its main tradition as a concentration on the
ordinary logic of intelligence. Most of us will be content to embrace
empiricism in this sense. It is distinct from Logical Empiricism or Logical
Positivism (Ayer, 1936; Carnap, 1967). Maybe it is better called reflective empiricism.

One of its results in this present
piece of informal thinking about determinism and its consequences, informal
thinking that looks backward and forward, is that determinism is true or at
least probable. There ought to be more determinists among us reflective
empiricists. Indeed there ought not to be any of us who are not also
determinists.

My pretty standard conception of
determinism (Honderich, 1988, 71-258; 2002, 22-64) is as follows. Events, some
of them long enough to be states, are things or entities having properties, and
events are the only subject-matter of determinism. There is causal and other
lawful connection between events, at bottom conditional connection, the
existence of dependencies, connections stated in conditional statements. To
speak only of causal connection, an event that is an effect is an event such
that it would still have happened, if or since and after a causal circumstance
happened, whatever else had happened consistently with a causal circumstance --
such a circumstance being a set of conditions including what we may designate
as the cause of the effect (1998, 13-70; 2002, 8-21).

It is important that lawfulness, for
all its complexity, can in this way be made clear. This way does not rely, for a
start, on what is too common, inexplicit reference to law. It does not include any speculative or theory-bound idea of
causation, say that effects are no more than mere probabilities or are to be
understood in terms of possible worlds. As we will be noticing, determinism is
at least that essential first step nearer truth than its denial with respect to
freedom and responsibility (cf. Hoefer, 2010).

My life has been such that my
reflective empiricism has never issued in doubt about the proposition that all
events are effects -- or anyway are lawful, the non-causal lawful pairs being
correlates other than causal circumstances and effects. As noted in previous
and dogged thinking on determinism and freedom, there has been no chance event
in my life, no event not lawful. No spoon has ever levitated at breakfast. No
matter my inability to explain particular events, to arrive at one of its
preceding sequence of causal circumstances, there has been no event of which
there has been reason to take it not to be the result of such a sequence.

I've never met anyone in ordinary
thinking life, in all its parts and levels save one, who said that an ordinary
event had no causal circumstance at all, nothing that made it happen, that it
had no adequate explanation, whether or not found. No one thinks any car
accident or even any falling out of love had no adequate cause. If you give any
weight to overwhelming consensus in judgement and belief, a weighting most
common in science, if you take some approximation to unanimity as being
indicative of truth, that is a very large fact. The premise for an inductive
inference, the inference fundamental to most science, is the greatest premise there is.

You may not be slow to say, of
course, that there is some science, some interpretation or application to the
world of some mathematics, that is against me. I am not slow to reply.

The
interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the application of that mathematics to the
world, has long been allowed to be logically a mess, and it would be called so
more often except for deference to physics. I mean that the indeterminist
interpretation reported to us has contradiction
in it, from the two-slit experiment onward (Honderich, 1988, 304-336; 2002,
71-76; cf Earman, 1986; Bishop, 2002; Hodgson, 2002).

It also has in it loose philosophy,
and a dilemma having to do with micro-determinism amplifying upwards into
macro-determinism or not, and an uncertainty as to whether it is really talking
about events at all when it says some things are not effects. All of this is
not put in doubt by the extent to which it works,
but such a non-explanatory recommendation was also had by its predecessor in
physics and is had by conceptions and the like elsewhere, say in medicine. With
determinism applied to our human existence, further, all physics has less
authority than neuroscience. In that judgement I do not overlook the very shaky
neuroscience-with-philosophy of Libet (Honderich 2004b), taken as evidence for
and then as a successor to the large work of Popper and Eccles on the self and
its mind (1977).

Do you need to be reminded that
affective attitude and the large and several-sided fact of subjectivity enters
into or at least influences judgements as to truth? You can best divide
consciousness into perceptual, cognitive, and affective, where the third part
or side is at bottom a matter of diverse desire. That includes intentions, and
hopes and life-hopes, and, most relevantly now, inclination to defer and
conform. You are likely also to agree, maybe to say you know all too well, that
our affective sides influence our cognitive sides. It is an inescapable fact.
Some of affective states have to do with great practices or institutions and
their history, and with consensus in them. One of those, indeed, is
science.

There seems to me no doubt at all,
despite my esteem for scientific method, no less than my esteem for ordinary
logic, that affective attitudes enter into what are taken as matters of only
cognition with respect to science. These attitudes, part of a certain hegemony
of science owed to its great usefulness, have issued in tolerance of what
cannot be tolerated, which is the mentioned contradiction and the rest. It is
no good, of course, celebrating inconsistency as deep mystery. It is possible
to forget that to say light is waves and also not waves is to say nothing.

It is my hopeful guess that the
heyday of physics-inspired indeterminism is over. In this connection I also
mention in passing, if not with heavy intention, renowned scepticisms having to
do with what might be called fashions in science (Kuhn, 1962),and acute
judgements with respect to scientific method (Godfrey-Smith, 2003). Can we toy
with the idea that indeterminism with respect to our choices and decisions will
one day be looked back on in the way we now look back on animism, the attribution of living souls to plants, inanimate
objects and natural phenomena?

Do you now observe, very properly,
that my proposition that a part of physics does not disprove determinism,
including the rest of science, is itself in part a matter of attitude? I cannot
possibly declare otherwise. We're all human, aren't we? What I can do, in
passing, is note something else.

It is not clear what significant
personal satisfaction determinists are supposed to gain from their theory.
Indeed, as we will be noticing, disadvantage is at least more likely. It was of
course speculated (Pagels, 1983, 20-23) that Einstein's determinism was owed
to some fact of personality, but that fact was never made clear. Was it a
'need' for order in the universe? Maybe something to do with his good politics?
Now, with the decline of Freudianism, tied to decline in belief in Freud's
veracity, I take it that the possibility of an accepted diagnosis of Einstein,
let alone determinists generally, is yet more remote. It may be that this
progress may have contributed to recent general and strong advocacies of
determinism (e.g. Oerton, 2012).

Is is clear, on the other hand, what
personal satisfaction indeterminists get from their theory, what
non-rational motivation there is. There is a lot of it. Their
indeterminism goes with a pervasive morality having to do with desert,
of which you will be hearing a bit more. It goes with personal impulses
almost all of us have, of which you will also be hearing a bit more. It
goes with having the support of consensus, also to be known less
reassuringly as democracy about truth. It goes with respectability and
what is taken as non-crankiness. It goes with mystery, whose allure in
much human existence is clear. It goes with religion.

Incompatibilism
and Compatibilism

But come away from the subjects of
determinism itself, its truth, and certain affective attitudes. Come away
towards a matter as great as the truth of determinism, which is its
consequences for us in our lives and our thinking of our lives.

The matter is best got into view by
way of thumbnail sketches of the historical responses to what has been, for
philosophers, the principal problem with respect to determinism. What follows
for us from determinism? What follows with respect to our freedom and
responsibility? That has been or maybe was the principal philosophical dispute
about determinsm from at least as far back as before Hume's flying the flag of
the regiment that followed him thereafter (1963 [1748], 95), and Kant's
insulting him for it (1949 [1788], 99) and raising another flag.

Kant's regiment is now not standing
so firmly, except perhaps in more remote and backward states of America and
counties of England and like places. Still, the regiment defends a proposition
about our being free in the primary ordinary sense, the sense that matters. It
is that our being free, and hence our being held responsible and credited with
responsibility for our actions, not to mention our prospect of heaven, is our
being free in a way logically incompatible with determinism.

This is so since free and
responsible action, as we are all supposed to know and obliged to know, is
action owed to choice or decision that is
uncaused and yet within the control of the actor. It is random in the first
and clear sense -- being uncaused -- but not in the obscure second sense.
Speaking of action being in control of an actor may come to little more than
that it is action such that the actor is open to affective attitudes of holding
him responsible or crediting him with responsibility -- but that is to say something(cf. Strawson, 2002).

So much for Kant's regiment of Incompatibilism. It defends freedom that
is best named as origination, maybe
what is most commonly meant by talk of free
will as against just freedom.

The other regiment, more on parade
still, defends the proposition that our being free and responsible, as we are
all supposed to know, is our being free in a way perfectly logically compatible
with determinism. This is so since, as we all know or should know, free action
is action owed not to no causation but to one kind of causation. Free action is
owed to self-determination, inner causation, say embraced desire (Honderich,
1988, 394; 2002, 95), rather than compulsion or constraint. This is Compatibilism.

These two tired traditions
(Honderich, 1988, 451-487; 2002, 105-21) have been elaborated and refurbished
over time, and to some lesser extent continue to be. Arguments of ingenuity
have been offered, mostly on the incompatibilist side (van Inwagen, 1983). I
respect them, but respect more the attraction of many philosophers to the
clarity of the idea of voluntariness. It is at least an aid to truth, something
hard to say for the tolerance of their opponents. That is a tolerance of at
least the relative obscurity, the exceedingly general and thus thin content of
the idea of origination -- decisions and choices not caused, not explained in
that obvious way, but still gestured at as in the control or the like of the
actor. Self-causation is the worst of this story.

Incompatibilism in its assertion of
the freedom of origination cannot be true or probable for the reason, a first
reason, that determinism is true or
probable. What of the idea shared by Incompatibilism and Compatibilism that we
have but one idea of freedom -- the
idea about which the two regiments disagree as as to what it is?

I myself cannot take at all seriously
this shared proposition that we have only one idea of freedom, anyway one idea
worth attending to. Incompatibilists say our only idea of freedom and of
responsibility in a primary ordinary sense is the idea of origination and the
responsibility based on it. Compatibilists say say our only idea of freedom and
responsibility has to do with voluntariness. If there are now Incompatibilists
and Compatibilists who have retreated to safer positions, who say that their
idea of freedom and responsibility is the one that matters, or the one favoured
by a better class of thinkers, that does not save them.

I cannot but put aside in passing a
recent third contention, semi-compatibilism, original but to me factitious. It is that
our single idea of freedom and our single attitude and practice of
responsibility are such that one is a concern with origination and the other is
a concern with voluntariness (Fischer, 2002). This ecumenicalism seems to me to
face an indubitable obstacle.

Prior to all theorizing, all dispute
between the two regiments, it is clear that any attitude and practice having to
do with responsibility is inseparable from a conception and belief having to do
with freedom. The attitude and practice simply has a content that in one of its
two main parts is a matter of freedom -- the other part having to do with
action being right or wrong (Honderich, 1988, 379-450; 2002, 91-104). And, to
come to the main point, it is to me inconceivable that if, as supposed, we have
one principal and fundamental idea of freedom, and one principal and
fundamental attitude and practice of responsibility, the second does not have
the first intrinsic or integral to to it. Semi-compatibilism, I suspect,
collapses into the truth that we have two ideas of freedom going with two attitudes
and practices of responsibility (Honderich, 2002, 120).

To return to Incompatibilism and
Compatibilism, Incompatibilism is false both because of determinism and the
only-one-idea proposition, and Compatibilism is false because of the
only-one-idea proposition. As far as I know, recent Incompatibilists and
Compatibilists,have not set out
explicitly to argue, let alone succeeded in arguing, that we do not also have
the idea of freedom and responsibility to which they are not inclined. They
would have had a job. to do so, for at least two large sorts of reason.

I myself am not and never have been
a member of a party that no longer exists, that of Oxford ordinary-language
philosophy associated with J. L. Austin (Warnock, 1989). But I have no hesitation
about citing the best repositories of our concepts and conceptions, these
repositories being dictionaries, and in particular the best shorter dictionary
I know. The New Oxford Dictionary of of
English. It defines freedom in the primary or core sense as 'the power or
right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint'. It
then gives the two relevant subsenses -- being free is (i) 'having the power
of self-determination attributed to the will, the quality of being independent of
fate or necessity', and being free is (ii) not being subject to enumerated
kinds of compulsion, constraint, and domination.

In the face just of this evidence,
both Incompatibilism and Compatibilism are nonsense. Moritz Schlick, the
Logical Positivist of Vienna, said Incompatibilism as against Compatibilism is
the greatest scandal of philosophy (1956, 143-4). He should have added into his
declaration its assumption of there being only one conception of freedom and
responsibility. But you may have more reservations about lexicographers and
Logical Positivists than I. So consider some other evidence, some other stuff
of reflective empiricism. Consider two examples or rather large cases,
certainly not the only cases.

We hear much, rightly, of human
rights, and of denials of them. They are rights to an array of things, from
enough food to sustain life to education to a lot else. To have such a right,
plainly, is to have a freedom. To claim such a right is to claim a freedom.
What freedom? What kind of freedom?

In this case of human rights it
would be mad to say it is origination. It would be mad to say people who want a
freedom from hunger and starvation or from invasion of their indigenous
homeland want an alteration of their human natures so that they can originate
actions, become mysteriously in control of their uncaused actions. They are
not under the influence of mediaeval or Kentucky or Dorset theologians. What
they want is a change in things outside of themselves, not in themselves. What they want, obviously, is the freedom which is
not being compelled by a lack of food, or more particularly by others or an
economic and social system, to be hungry or to be ignorant.

Now the other case, our yet more
personal and sometimes private lives. We also hear a lot in both covert and
overt ways with respect to what purports to be another many-sided fact. The
fact, so to speak, includes what people deserve
in terms or punishment or income or respect or whatever. If I give this paper
as a talk in Kentucky or Dorset, and a clever fellow manages really to insult
me effectively in public, call in question my intelligence, I am unlikely to be
able to respond only by thinking and feeling that his insult was voluntary. I
shall feel an impulse of retribution that presupposes that as things had been
in his life and were then, he could then have done otherwise. He could have
done otherwise in the sense not that his insult was not compelled or
constrained but in the sense that he could have done what his power of origination
or free will allowed.

If we cannot for this second reason
alone respond to determinism in the single-minded Incompatibilist way or in the
Compatibilist way, by way of their shared mistake, how are we to respond to it?
Evidently we have to give up on the idea of origination and the responsibility
attached to it. What of the obvious alternative of responding by means of
voluntariness alone? The alternative of taking it that we need to live with
only the idea of voluntariness and the responsibility attached to it?

It remains my view that part of the
answer must be neither what was called Dismay or Intransigence, but rather
something called Affirmation (Honderich, 1988, 488-540; 2002, 122-132). You can
also think about the reassurance of being your own man, being your own woman
(Honderich, 2002, 142-147). But there is more to be said, more to be thought
about and worked on. Consider a proposition of the foremost contemporary
philosopher of Incompatibilism, Robert Kane (1998). He has the great recommendation
of explaining that not only Incompatibilists but also the rest of us want
something of a general kind that Incompatibilism and in particular origination
would give us. This is distinct from the motivationsof Incompatibilism already mentioned. It is standing.

We want a human standing that
separates us from what used to be called nature,
or anway the rest of nature, in some sense puts us apart from or even above the objective physical world or the rest
of that world, which origination would have done. Or, to state a better and
more respectable requirement, we want an explanation of what there is reason to
call a truth, that we have such a
standing, at least that we are
somehow different from the rest of nature. We have a true sense of our lives
such that determinism and voluntariness do not satisfy it.

Actual
Consciousness and Subjective Physical Worlds

What can be added as quickly is that
the subject of freedom and responsibility has never been separable from the
subject of consciousness. It is not just that there is no question at all of
freedom and responsibility with respect to what is unconscious. It is that
consciousness gives to any species, and in a special way to our species, a kind
of distinction different from, say, the distinction between the living and the
non-living, a distinction that is bound up with freedom and responsibility.

Is it the case that any conception of our consciousness
serves this argument? If the answer is not easy, it is still no. It is clear
enough that a really flattening objective physicalism about consciousness, say
a physicalism that makes no effective distinction between consciousness in the
or a primary ordinary sense and the rest of the mental, no effective
distinction between such consciousness in seeing, thinking and wanting as
against the rest of mentality, will not provide a distinction that is useful. So
with Block's two ideas of consciousness, phenomenal and access consciousness
(1997, 2007). The situation is not much complicated by the fact that all of
what I am calling flattening physicalisms do of course maintain they are not
such. Dennett's is a fortitudinous exemplar (1984, 1991).

Is it the case that any conception
of consciousness other than flattening physicalism will serve the end in
question as well? The short answer must again be no. It is no for the reason
that the couple of dozen existing theories of consciousness contain so many
that are open to serious objections that make them of at least limited use in
the way we are considering (cf. Caruso, 2012). Abstract functionalism, which is
standard functionalism, and such associated lines of life as a kind of
cognitive science, as against a conceivably physical functionalism, share the
disability of traditional dualism or spiritualism. I myself have reservations
not much less serious against the Higher Order Theory of consciousness
(Rosenthal, 2005) and various others. They include strong doctrines of
supervenience (Kim, 2005), general representationalisms (Dretske, 1995), and
biological naturalism (Searle, 1992).

I end with anticipation of a very
different theory of consciousness and then with a hope, a grand hope, what you
can properly call a hope of mankind.

The speculation attached to the
different theory is that there are different facts on which we can rest, facts
that gives us a standing or standings that may leave us content despite the loss
attendant on giving up origination. Certainly it is a speculation that makes us
different in several related ways from the rest of nature. If its beginnings
(Freeman, 2006) include nothing whatever about freedom and responsibility, but
much about an adequate initial clarification of consciousness in the ordinary
sense, it does give to us a standing given to us by no other theory.

Let me say quickly that it is in
part an externalism or anti-cranialism different in kind from those of Putnam (1975), Burge
(2007), Noe (2009), and Clark (2011). It is an externalism with respect only to
perceptual consciousness as against cognitive and affective consciousness --
the latter consisting in representations having to do with truth and desire.

A first thing to be said or promised
with respect to this theory of consciousness (Honderich, 2013), is that an arguable account of
consciousness in the primary ordinary sense is open to summary in a certain way. This consciousness, in
accordance with a lot of data we have, is something's
being actual. In the present speedy report, I add no more to that than the
following general proposition. It is possible to give an account of what can be
called actual consciousness that
separates it from the rest of what there is, not by a retreat to dualism as
against physicalism, but to a recognition of a fundamental kind of physicality,
as fundamental as any.

If a sentence of anticipation is
worth anything, the theory is to the effect that for you to be perceptually conscious
now is for there to be a subjective
physical world external to you, a world of space outside you, in
causal relations, and so on. This world, say this room, whose particular
physicality cannot be in doubt, is dependent on the objective physical world.
It is also dependent, crucially, on you neurally. You have this standing lacked
by anything that lacks perceptual consciousness. On this theory, as someone
else might give in to the temptation to say, and I do not, you have standing of
being a little demigod, if one among very many indeed.

Humanity

Coming on now to the grand if faint
hope, it has something to do with what has been mentioned already, that we are
all, or all save a very few of us, inclined to impulses of retribution, what
can as well be called impulses of desert, impulses that have within them an
idea or anyway something like an image of origination. The grand hope, however,
has much more to do with something much larger -- practices and institutions of
retribution and desert that are fundamental to our societies. Punishment will
come back to your mind immediately. So should our systems of reward by desert,
systems having to do in one part with income and wealth.

These systems in our societies, the
hierarchic democracies of Britain and United States and those others along
similar lines, are of course open to classification and theorizing of many
kinds. To my mind, they are most generally classified as being systems of Conservatism. This includes at least
much Liberalism, such as that of the Liberal Democrat party in the coalition
government of the United Kingdom as of now. You ask what Conservatism is, and I
must reply with outrageous brevity.

It is the self-interest, a
self-interest of individuals and classes, that has no arguable principle of
right and wrong to defend itself (Honderich, 2005). It has, for a start, on
account of the truth of determinism and the non-existence of origination, no
general principle of desert to defend itself. There is also the difficulty, not
so particular to this conversation, that it can be argued that no principle of
desert succeeds in understanding propositions of the form X is deserved in such a way to distinguish them from X is right -- with the upshot that every
principle of desert is fundamentally of the circular formX is
right because it is right.

Conservatism is different, to say
the least, from what I shall call the Left in politics, a tradition of as much
self-interest but with a principle of right and wrong that defends it in
pursuing that self-interest. That is the Principle of Humanity. It is, in a
sentence, that what is right is what is rational, only what is rational, with
respect to the end of getting and keepin people out of bad lives, these being
lives to different extents deprived of the great human goods, frustrated in the
great desires of human nature. These goods and desires have to do with length
of conscious life, bodily well-being, freedoms and powers, respect and
self-respect, goods of relationship, and the goods of culture.

The practices and institutions of
desert in our societies are owed less to any intrinsic or genetic or ordinarily
evolved human attributes than to something else. They are owed to the tradition
of Conservatism, the self-interest incapable of justifying itself. My great hope,
a hope in which I invite you to join, is the grand if faint hope of the Left in
morals and politics. My invitation, in the context of this moment, has to do
with determinism, freedom, the non-existence of origination, and wrong and
right.

It is that the abandoning of
Incompatibilism, Compatibilism, ordinary belief and inclination with respect to
origination, and the politics of desert that is a main source of the belief and
inclination, has the recommendation of serving the end of the great principle
of right and wrong, the Principle of Humanity. We can have the support of that
principle, so to speak, in living with what follows from the falsehood of the
proposition of origination.

It is not only that we can, in truth, see that our
standing is greater by reflection on perceptual consciousness as conceived in
the theory of Actual Consciousness. We can hope for our human successors an
escape from at least the temptation to an attitude that is a means of those of
us who are wrongly defending our societies as they are.

One more thought. You will agree,
maybe, that there is at least the possibility of consolation having to do with
perceptual consciousness in the necessary escape from the stuff about
origination. With respect to the great hope, you are less likely to agree, maybe, in what you may call my intruding
of morals and politics into our inquiry.

I make no apology at all. I merely
remind or inform you of something. The very best account of the whole history
of the questions of determinism and freedom is that one by Mortimer J. Adler
and what was The Institute for Philosophical Research. This account, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical
Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom(1958), divides the history into
thinking about origination, voluntariness, and a third way -- what is called self-perfection.
I reduce the latter idea by remarking that it has to do with the freedom that
is the circumstance of the good man,
and I reduce it horribly by saying that it has to do with, in its very least
persuasive conception, the freedom of he
or she who is free from sin.

You will note the consonance between
this tradition of thinking on freedom and my remarks about the Principle of
Humanity and the hope. I add, finally, that the part of Adler's history that
considers the thinking of freedom that is thinking of origination and
voluntariness, rather than self-perfection, adds in an extensive consideration
of those bodies of thinking in so far as their content is social and political.
A large part of the thinking on voluntariness, a part given separate attention,
is on political freedom.

References

Adler,
Mortimer, 1958, The Idea of Freedom: A
Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom. Doubleday.